Hi everyone, I’m considering buying a Hapax as a hardware sequencer for Novation Summit, Modular and potentially Gigitone and Digitakt. I come from a background of writing piano scores and would like to write linear compositions for these devices (i.e. not loop/pattern based) and want to get away from drawing rectangles with a mouse in logic. Seemingly no hardware sequencer wants to do this job as it’s first port of call but I’m wondering, is there anything to prevent me using each pattern more like a ‘section’ and chaining up to to 16 sections together? I often compose in sections at the moment, for example A, B, C, D etc and each may be a different length, have tempo changes, time sig changes etc bar to bar. It wouldn’t seem like there’s anything in the Hapax that would stop me from reading around the subject but would appreciate experienced users views on whether I’m going to run into any obvious limitations and what the experience of doing this might feel like in real life. Thanks in advance.
Tempo changes cannot be automated unfortunately. Time signature is also set per project but this is mostly to do with UI, and nothing prevents you from making patterns of arbitrary length.
Chaining patterns is explicitly supported, you can set a “follow action” that triggers the next pattern in the track.
get a Deluge.
Thanks Chris, is this your preferred sequencer?
Thanks for the heads up about the tempo, think I can work around the time signature restrictions but tempo is worth considering
for linear (piano roll style) sequencing, yes. but doesn’t have the deep MIDI feature implementation that Hapax has gotten in the last few OS updates (although the new open source Deluge community firmware continues to do wonders in expanding its functions). just different tools for different use cases
Having a great time reading through loads of pages here learning a lot! I’m considering either Hapax or Deluge (or just sticking to my MPC One+ biting the bullet and surrender to that for me very non-optimal workflow, if neither of them will fit).
@chrisroland The piano-roll bit is really important for me, and so is building entire complete songs. I understand that there will be no complete perfect daw-replacement by either Hapax or Deluge. Sigh, I remember back in the MS-DOS days making a song in Fasttracker II or ImpulseTracker and that it took a bit over a weekend to learn and then making a song was 2 hours… Am I correct in assuming that Hapax is a quicker path to “just sequence some songs” than the Deluge is? So hard to get a grasp around any of this having zero experience of both the devices.